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Carl Sagan told me when I was young
We are all made of stars
And Darwin said all life's descended from
Ancient common ancestors...

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Don't get me wrong. I like Lady Gaga. I respect Lady Gaga. I'm even reasonably fond of "Born This Way" (although I do think it's awfully goddamn close to "Express Yourself" -- there is a line between "homage" and "ripoff", people!).

But the lyrics kind of get up my nose. They got up my nose the first time I heard it; they get up my nose more and more on every subsequent listening. The whole "God makes no mistakes" bull keeps making me want to scream, "There is no god! And if you believe in a god who created the world and is responsible for how it's turning out, how can you not think that he makes mistakes all the freaking time! Sinuses! Knees! Too-narrow birth canals! Pediatric cancer! Have you read anything about evolution? Do you even know how it works? Rrrrrr!"

If it were just a couple of passing mentions, it wouldn't bug me so much. But religion is all over the freaking song. "'Cause he made you perfect, babe"; "God makes no mistakes"; "Believe capital H-i-m"... it's all over the song like a cheap suit. Indeed, the whole bloody theme of the song -- "I'm on the right track, baby, I was born this way," in the context of "God makes no mistakes," smacks strongly of deistic theistic predestination. Not to mention a piss-poor understanding of evolution, and how life came into being, and why we are the way we are.

And I want no part of it. I don't think we should love ourselves because God made us the way we are. I think we should love ourselves because we're awesome and lucky to be alive, and because our lives and the lives of the people around us improve vastly when we love ourselves. And the teleological fallacy seriously gets my goat. There is no reason to think that we were "born this way" because some invisible all-powerful supernatural entity shaped us into being on purpose to make him happy, or even because evolution proceeds in a specific direction towards some supposedly "higher" state of being. We're not on "the right track" -- there is no track. We were "born this way" because of natural selection, coupled with random chance. Period.

Okay. Deep breath. I am clearly taking this waaaaaay too seriously.

So anyway. When Ingrid and I marched with the atheist contingent in the LGBT Pride Parade this year, Ingrid really, really wanted to make a sign that was an atheist riff on "Born This Way." (She assumed -- rightly so, as it turns out -- that "Born This Way" would be getting played to death at this year's parade.) And at almost the very last minute, the night before the parade, she came up with her totally brilliant sign concept: "Evolved This Way." We jokingly started coming up with parody song lyrics on our way to the parade... and I got the bug in my brain, and couldn't stop until I had the whole thing done. (And can I just say: Some of the best lines are the ones lifted wholesale from the original song. "In the religion of the insecure"? I couldn't have done better.) Enjoy!

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Evolved This Way

It doesn't matter if you sing hymns,
There's no capital H-I-M
Just put your paws up
'Cause you evolved this way, baby

Carl Sagan told me when I was young
We are all made of stars
And Darwin said all life's descended from
Ancient common ancestors

"There's nothing wrong with loving who you are,"
They said, "'Cause we're all imperfect, babe
Our knees and sinuses don't work for shit
But we're alive -- so celebrate!"

Lucky to be here today
There's no god making mistakes
I'm on the tree of life, baby
I evolved this way

Humans and seaweed and cats
Mushrooms and beetles and rats
You know there's no track, baby
We evolved this way

Could have gone another way
Thank your mutant DNA
Baby, we evolved this way

Could have gone another way
If that asteroid had strayed
No track, baby, we evolved this way

It's sometimes hard to see this scary world
With life in our own puny hands
In the religion of the insecure
They think it's all a master plan.

It might be pretty to believe that lie
But it's all an S-H-A-M
I love myself, I love my friends, and I
Accept that it's all going to end.

Lucky to be here today
There's no god making mistakes
I'm a primate, baby
I evolved this way

Gorillas, roses and dogs
Amoebas, algae and frogs
You know there's no track, baby
We evolved this way

Could have gone another way
Thank your mutant DNA
Baby, we evolved this way

Could have gone another way
If mammals hadn't made the grade
No track, baby, we evolved this way

If you survive, you'll make the scene
Then reproduce, pass on your genes
Random mutations roll the dice
Change every species, moss or mice
Forget your teleology
There's no track on life's gorgeous tree
Rejoice and love yourself today
'Cause baby you evolved this way

No matter huge or small fry
Whether you swim or you fly
You know there's no track, baby
We evolved to survive

No matter feathers or fur
Whether you bark or you purr
You know there's no track, baby
We were shaped by this world

Lucky to be here today
There's no god making mistakes
I'm on the tree of life, baby
I evolved this way

Mosquitos, plankton and pigs
Canaries, leeches and figs
You know there's no track, baby
We evolved this way

Could have gone another way
Thank your mutant DNA
Baby, we evolved this way

Could have gone another way
If grandma hadn't gotten laid
No track, baby, we evolved this way

We evolved this way-hey
We evolved this way-hey
You know there's no track, baby
We evolved this way-hey

We evolved this way-hey
We evolved this way-hey
You know there's no track, baby
We evolved this way-hey

Note: I would love, love, LOVE to make a YouTube video of this. I don't have the singing chops or video-making skills to do it on my own... but if someone out there wants to collaborate, please let me know. It doesn't have to be a fancy video; I'd be totally happy with one of those "sequence of still images" numbers, and will even find the images. If you can sing ([cough] JT [cough]), and/ or if you have video-making skills, drop me a line at greta (at) gretachristina (dot) com.

This piece was originally published on AlterNet. Update: I have removed "Here Comes Santa Claus" from my Honorable Mentions list, since it was pointed out that the the last two verses do mention God, in a freakish mix of the Jesus and Santa mythologies. Thanks for the correction!

What do you do if you're an atheist who likes Christmas carols?

It's widely assumed that atheists, by definition, hate Christmas. And it's an assumption I'm baffled by. I like Christmas. Lots of atheists I know like Christmas. Heck, even Richard Dawkins likes Christmas. Plenty of atheists recognize the need for rituals that strengthen social bonds and mark the passing of the seasons. Especially when the season in question is dark and wet and freezing cold. Add in a culturally- sanctioned excuse to spend a month of Saturdays eating, drinking, flirting, and showing off our most festive shoes, and we're totally there. And we find our own ways to adapt/ create/ subvert the holiday traditions to our own godless ends.

Sure, most of us would like for our governments to not be sponsoring religious displays at the holidays. Or any other time. What with the whole "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" thing. And some of us do rather resent the cultural hegemony of one particular religious tradition being crammed down everybody's throat, in a grotesque, mutant mating of homogenized consumerism and saccharine piety. But it's not like all atheists are Grinchy McScrooges. Many of us are very fond of Christmas. Some atheists even like Christmas carols. I'm one of them.

It is, however, definitely the case that, since I've become an atheist activist, my pleasure in many Christmas carols has been somewhat diminished. It's harder for me to sing out lustily about angels and magic stars and the miracle of the virgin birth, without rolling my eyes just a little. And I do notice the more screwed-up content of many Christmas songs more than I used to: the guilty self-loathing, the fixation on the blood sacrifice, the not- so- subtle anti-Semitism. I'm content to sing most of these songs anyway (except "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," which always makes me cringe). But for some time now, I've been on the lookout for Christmas songs that I can sing entirely happily, without getting into annoying theological debates in my head.

So, with the help of my Facebook friends, I've compiled a list of Christmas songs that atheists can love unreservedly.

The rules:

Songs cannot have any mention of God, Jesus, angels, saints, or miracles. Not even in Latin. This is the key, the raison d'etre of this whole silly game. I'm not going to start making exceptions just so I can sneak in the "Boar's Head Carol." And yes, this rules out "Good King Wenceslas." Hey, I like it too, it's pretty and has a nice (if somewhat politically complicated) message about how rich kings should help poor people. But come on, people. It's about a Christian saint with magical powers. No can do. (I will, however, grant a "saints with magical powers" exemption to Santa.)

Songs must be reasonably well-known. Yes, this rules out some truly excellent stuff. Many of my favorite Christmas songs, atheist or otherwise, are on the obscure side: from the grisly, gothy, paganesque "Corpus Christi Carol" (I do love me some gruesome Christmas songs), to the simultaneously haunting and peppy "Patapan," to Tim Minchin's funny, touching, pointedly godless "White Wine in the Sun." But it's no fun singing Christmas songs by yourself. For a song to make my list, a reasonable number of people at your holiday party should be able to sing it... or at least chime in on the first verse before trailing off into awkward pauses and "La la la"s.

No song parodies. It hurts like major surgery for me to make this rule. Some of my very favorite Christmas songs of all time are song parodies: my friend Tim's hilariously on-target Christmas-themed parody of "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Christmas Rhapsody"; the entire "Very Scary Solstice" songbook from the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society; every Mad Magazine Christmas carol parody ever written. Song parodies are an excellent way to redeem a pretty Christmas tune from cringe-inducing lyrics, and many are just excellent songs on their own. But the idea here is that atheists can have a completely heartfelt, non-snarky love for Christmas music. So to make it onto my list, songs must be entirely sincere. (I will, however, give bonus points to classic Christmas songs that have spawned good parodies.)

Songs have to be good songs. A subjective judgment, I realize. And for the purposes of this game, one that is to be made entirely by me. Deal with it. I don't care how secular it is: "Suzy Snowflake" is not making it onto my freaking Christmas song list.

Bonus points: A song gets bonus points for not mentioning the word "Christmas." It's okay if it does -- I don't think the word has to mean "Christ's Mass," any more than "goodbye" has to mean "God be with you" or "Thursday" has to mean "Thor's day." But songs that have become widely accepted Christmas carols without even mentioning the concept get bonus points: for chutzpah, if nothing else.

And songs get bonus points for being written more than 100 years ago. I'm not a reflexive hater of modern Christmas songs; in fact, some of them I quite like. But some of the best stuff about Christmas music is the old, old, tunes: the soaring, haunting melodies and harmonies that resonate back through the centuries. If a song can do that and still not mention the baby Jesus, I'm sold.

So with these rules in mind, here are my Top Ten Christmas Carols Even An Atheist Could Love.

10: White Christmas. This is a funny one. I don't even particularly like this song: it's kind of drippy, and it lends itself far too well to unctuous lounge singers. But come on, people. It was written by a freaking agnostic. A Jewish agnostic at that. And it's become one of the most classic, wildly popular entries in the Christmas music canon. How can you not love an entirely secular Christmas classic written by a Jewish agnostic?

9: Jingle Bells. A bit overplayed, I'll grant you. But it's cheery, and it's old, and it's fun to sing. The second through fourth verses (you know, the ones nobody sings or has even heard of) are all about courting girls, racing horses, and getting into accidents, so that's entertaining. And the thing doesn't mention the word "Christmas" once. Heck, it wasn't even written as a Christmas song; it was written as a Thanksgiving song. You can happily teach it to your kids without worrying that you're indoctrinating them into a death cult. Plus it's spawned a burgeoning cottage industry of children's song parodies, in the time-honored "Jingle bells, Batman smells" oeuvre. (Tangent: Do kids still sing that even though "Batman" isn't on TV anymore?)

8: Sleigh Ride. For those who like jingling bells, but are a bit sick of "Jingle Bells" after all these years. Relentlessly cheerful. Lots of fun to sing, except for the weirdly tuneless bridge about Farmer Gray's birthday party.... but then you get back into the sleigh bells jingling, ring- ting- tingling too, and you're back in business. And no God, or Jesus, or even Christmas. Just snow, and singing, and pumpkin pie, and friends calling "Yoo hoo!" A trifle saccharine, I'll grant you -- a bit too nostalgic for a Norman Rockwell America that never really existed -- but still good, clean, secular fun.

7: Silver Bells. I'm sure I'm going to get roundly hated on for this one. Lots of people truly loathe modern Christmas songs, especially the ones in the drippy lounge- singer category. (See "White Christmas" above.) But I have a genuine soft spot for this one, for a very specific reason: It's one of the few Christmas songs that celebrates the urban Christmas. Most Christmas songs sing the bucolic joys of sleigh rides and forests and holly and whatnot... joys that are entirely outside of my own experience of Christmas. My own experience of Christmas is shopping and crowded streets and lavish decorations and electric light displays that could power a goat farm for a year. The very joys that "Silver Bells" is celebrating. And the tune is really pretty. Also it's in 3/4 time, which means you can waltz to it. So thumbs-up from me. If you sing it in a peppy, up-tempo beat, you can avoid the whole lounge-singer vibe pretty easily.

6: We Wish You a Merry Christmas. I was going to include at least one wassailing song in this list. Wassailing songs are among the finest secular Christmas traditions, and the general concept is familiar to a lot of people, even if the specific examples of it aren't. But alas, every single one of them either (a) is entirely obscure outside folk-nerd circles, or (b) mentions God at least once. Even if it's just in an "And God bless you and send you a happy New Year" context. I couldn't find even one completely secular wassailing song that'd be familiar to anyone who doesn't go to Renaissance Faires. So I'm letting "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" stand in for the "going from door to door singing and begging for food" wassailing genre. It's reasonably pretty, it's fun to sing, a lot of people who don't go to Renaissance Faires know it. And it celebrates two great Christmas traditions: pestering the neighbors, and eating yourself sick.

5: Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Another in the "Christmas songs that are really about the entirely secular joys of snow and winter" oeuvre. I like this one because it's not about mucking around in the actual snow, so much as it is about staying the hell out of it. Canoodling in front of the fire where it's warm and dry -- there's a Christmas song for me! Plus it's about being in love at Christmas, which is a lovely theme... and one that, like the urban Christmas, is sadly under-represented. And it's another classic Christmas song written by Jewish songwriters, which always tickles me. Thumbs up.

4: Santa Baby. Yeah, yeah. Everyone loves to gripe about the commercialization of Christmas. I griped about it myself, just a few paragraphs ago. But it's hard not to love a song that revels in it so blatantly, and with such sensual. erotic joy. Cars, yachts, fur coats, platinum mines, real estates, jewelry, and cold hard cash, with the not- so- subtle implication of sexual favors being offered in return -- the reason for the season! Plus it has the class to get the name of the jewelry company right. (It's Tiffany, people, not Tiffany's!) And the only magical being it recognizes is an increasingly secular gift-giving saint with an apparent weakness for sultry, husky- voiced cabaret singers. (And who can blame him? Faced with Eartha Kitt batting her metaphorical eyes at me, I'd be pulling out my checkbook, too.)

3: Carol of the Bells. A trifle hard to sing in parts. But it's awfully darned pretty. No, strike that. It is stunning. It is lavishly, thrillingly beautiful. It has that quality of being both eerie and festive that's so central to so much great Christmas music... and it has it in trumps. It is freaking old -- the original Ukrainian folk tune it's based on may even be prehistoric -- and it sounds it. In the best possible way. It is richly evocative of ancient mysteries, conveying both the joy and the peace that so many Christmas carols are gassing on about. And it does it without a single mention of God or Jesus or any other mythological beings. Just a "Merry, merry, merry, merry Christmas." I'm down with that.

2: Winter Wonderland. Yes, I know. Another modern one. Hey, what do you expect? Christmas got a whole lot more secular in the last century. But I unabashedly love this song, and I don't care who knows it. It has a lovely lilting saunter to it, a melody and rhythm that makes you physically feel like you're taking a brisk, slightly slippery winter walk with the snow crunching under your boots. It gets bonus points for being a ubiquitous, entirely non-controversial Christmas classic that doesn't mention the word "Christmas" even once. And it's another Christmas love song, which always makes me happy. I get all goopy and sentimental whenever I hear the lines, "To face unafraid/The plans that we've made." Sniff.

And finally, the hands-down runaway winner, the no-question-in-my-mind Best Atheist Christmas Song of All Time:

1: Deck the Halls. It's totally gorgeous. It's unrepentantly cheerful -- jolly, one might even say -- with just a hint of that haunting spookiness that makes for the best Christmas songs. It celebrates all the very best parts of Christmas: singing, playing music, decorating, dressing up, telling stories, hanging around fires, and generally being festive with the people we love. It's old as the hills: the lyrics are well over 100 years old, and the tune dates back to at least the 16th century, if not earlier. Absolutely everybody knows the thing, and even the folks who don't can chime in cheerfully on the "Fa la la la la" part. It's ridiculously easy to sing without being boring. Plus it's spawned one of the finest song parodies ever: "Deck Us All with Boston Charlie," from Walt Kelly's Pogo, a parody that's almost as beloved as the original song.

And it doesn't mention God, or Jesus, or angels, or virgin births, or magical talking animals, or redemption of guilt through blood sacrifice, or any supernatural anything. Not even once. Heck, it doesn't even mention Christmas. This is a Yule song, dammit -- and proud of it! If there are any gods at all who inspired this song, they are entirely pagan pre-Christian ones. Totally, 100% made of atheist Christmas win.

Honorable mentions. The 12 Days of Christmas. It's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Up on the Housetop. Over the River and Through the Woods. Jolly Old St. Nicholas. The Christmas Song (a.k.a. Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire). I'll Be Home For Christmas. Frosty the Snowman. Jingle Bell Rock. O Christmas Tree. All these fit all my criteria, and would be perfectly reasonable additions to your secular Christmas songbook. They just didn't quite make my Top Ten.

It's absolutely dead-on. The lyrics, the performance, the production, everything. You will never be able to listen to "Bohemian Rhapsody" again without thinking of it... and without falling into fits of the giggles when you do.

Trust me on this one. Even if you hate Christmas. It is hilarious, and it is freaking brilliant. Just take my word for it.

And if you like that, here's more Tim-related holiday music. My fave: the gothy, Dead-Can-Dance-ish version of Down In The Forest, described by Tim as "A dark and slightly confused Yuletide nightmare. It has something to do with the Fisher King. Maybe." Enjoy, and Happy Yule!

Encapsulating the celebrity gossip magazine's bone-deep schizophrenia about dieting and body size... in one neat sentence.

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Thus begins my latest Media Darling column on CarnalNation, Don't Feed the Stars!: Celebrity Bodies and Gossip's New Schizophrenia. To find out more about the celebrity-industrial complex's freakishly self-contradictory attitude towards diet and weight loss -- and the deeply mixed messages it sends the rest of us about food, beauty, bodies, and sex -- read the rest of the piece. (And if you feel inspired to comment here, please consider cross-posting your comment to Carnal Nation -- they like comments there, too.) Enjoy!

I realize that I'm late to the Lady Gaga party. (Hey, I'm 48 years old. Cut me some slack.) But I gotta say -- I'm impressed.

If I just listened to her music, I'd only be moderately interested. I think her music is perfectly fun, well- above- average dance pop music. But I've been watching her music videos... and they're making me think that this woman is a force to be reckoned with. (Yes, I realize she doesn't direct her own videos -- but they are clearly collaborations, strongly shaped by her artistic vision, and they're a central part of her public persona.)

And what's striking me about Lady Gaga's music videos is not just how smart they are, or how imaginative, or how lovingly crafted and visually stunning, or how just flat-out funny. What's striking me about Lady Gaga's music videos is how strongly influenced they are by sex culture: by fetish fashion, by sexploitation flicks, and by plain old dirty porn.

What's more, they seem to be strongly influenced by these cultures, not as an outsider, not as someone who's manipulating this imagery to titillate/ shock the audience, but as an insider, someone who's intimately familiar with both sex culture and sexual marginalization. This isn't Britney Spears, using schoolgirl or slavegirl or girl- on- girl imagery to excite her audience without any apparent understanding or affinity for it. Lady Gaga's music videos (coupled with her interviews about her work) show a thoughtful, informed insight into polymorphous perversity. She has an analysis that could easily hold its own in any queer theory/ gender theory/ sex theory forum -- and damn do I love a sexy girl with an analysis! -- and her freak flag is waving high and proud.

In a way that -- if I can be crass for a moment -- makes her videos very functional as porn. I've certainly seen other music videos that turned me on. I can't remember seeing any that made me this hungry to watch them again and again... with a vibrator handy.

"Telephone" may be the best example of these porny influences. A brazen riff on "women in prison" sexploitation flicks -- and "women in prison" porn flicks -- the video plays with kinky imagery, catfight imagery, and girl-girl porn imagery... all reclaimed into a defiantly queer sexuality. (Yes, Lady Gaga is an out bisexual.) The women are costumed in the sexist, sluttiest, most wildly fantastical, least plausible prisoner uniforms imaginable, far outstripping the implausibly slutty costumes of any "women in prison" porn or sexploitation movie I've seen: elaborate platform heels, leather bondage collars, luxuriously trashy lingerie, chains draped around bodies, sunglasses made of cigarettes, leather gear studded and zippered within an inch of its life. Latex prison stripes for Ms. Gaga herself -- rudely stripped off by the butch prison guards, to reveal black taped X's over her nipples and fishnet hose with nothing but pixels underneath. All with cleavage and thighs and asses on meticulously offhand display. And all with breakneck-speed costume changes that defy even porn logic.

Although... well, maybe "Beautiful, Dirty Rich" is the best example. A decadent, libertine, "beautiful useless people" bisexual free-form grope-fest, its vision of trashy affluence would do the excesses of either the Weimar Republic or the Roman Empire proud. Statues get humped, piles of money get rolled in, and the brass railing of a posh elevator gets used like a stripper pole. All in a style that hints at both amateur basement porn and "La Dolce Vita."

And now that I think about it... maybe "Bad Romance" is the best example. This may be both the strangest and the kinkiest Lady Gaga video of all. (Not surprisingly, it's also my favorite.) In a futuristic bathhouse, strangely costumed women perform a private stage show for wealthy, sinister men who sit back calmly and consume the entertainment. (Much like we, the audience, are consuming the entertainment.) Gaga is forced by her fellow dancers into displaying herself and performing a sex-kitten lap dance for the audience, and later takes herself into the bedchamber of one of them, who seems to have paid for the pleasure at an Internet auction. (I think. This particular video seems to have been influenced by Matthew Barney's "Cremaster" films as much as by fetish porn, and the storyline is a little surreal and hard to follow.) This is Lady Gaga, though, always firmly in control even when she's wildly out of it, and she takes her revenge in the end by... well, I don't want to spoil such a lovely surprise.

The fashion in this video isn't just influenced by fetish fashion. The fashion is fetish fashion: from the masked latex catsuits to the strappy red lingerie to the six- inch- heel patent leather boots. Much has been made of the unwearable Alexander McQueen "alien" shoes that Lady Gaga proved were wearable in this video. I have not yet seen any mention made of the fact that the things bear an uncanny resemblance to pony play shoes. The ones that look like hooves.

But then maybe... oh, you get the idea. There's "Paparazzi", an ambivalent encomium to exhibitionism, sexual and otherwise, which eroticizes crutches and wheelchairs in a way that makes me think Gaga must have seen Japanese medical/ bandage porn. (Not to mention David Cronenberg's "Crash.") There's "Poker Face", featuring yet another bisexual free-for-all grope-fest. There's "LoveGame", with the poles on a subway car being repurposed as stripper poles, and the male dancers getting arrested and bent over cop cars, and Gaga seducing a cop in the security booth. (A cop who, mysteriously but alluringly, keeps switching genders.) I could go on.

But I kind of want to get to the point here.

Now, Lady Gaga is far from the first person to incorporate porn imagery into pop culture. She's not even the first person to incorporate it into music videos. Madonna leaps immediately to mind, as does Fiona Apple's "Criminal," as does every rock or rap video with scantily-clad coochie girls, ever. But Lady Gaga does it in a way that seems to be unique. (At least, I haven't seen it before. Again -- middle-aged lady here. Not exactly a connoisseur of the contemporary music video genre.)

The way Lady Gaga incorporates porn imagery into her music video is entirely shameless.

And by "shameless," I don't mean "flaunting it" or "in your face." I mean, quite literally, "without shame." Lady Gaga's music videos incorporate a fascinating assortment of influences, from culture both high and low. I see Fellini in her videos, and Matthew Barney, and David Cronenberg, and "Natural Born Killers," and the high-art end of high fashion, and "Thelma and Louise," and much more.

I also see sexploitation, and fetish culture, and porn.

And nowhere do I see any hint that these influences ought not to be mixed -- or that some are more equal than others.

The high-art influences and the porny influences are folded into one another seamlessly. The "women in prison" story in "Telephone" is given equal weight to the "women on the road/ mass murder" story. In "Bad Romance," the latex fetish gear contributes as much as to the unnervingly antiseptic surrealism as the glossy white sets and the cyborg facial jewelry. The sexual exhibitionism in "Paparazzi" is as much a part of the commentary on fame as the flashing lights of the cameras. Sex is clearly a central part of Lady Gaga's life and work -- and she explores it in her videos with every bit as much enthusiasm, and every bit as much gravitas, as she does any other aspect of her life and work.

And I think this is not only why I like these videos so much, but why I find them so arousing. My favorite porn is almost always porn that (a) vividly gets across the feeling of a unique sexual experience, and (b) applies careful and loving craft to the medium in question, in a way that enhances the expression of sexuality rather than obscuring it. My favorite porn is almost always porn that recognizes the human complexities of sex... while luxuriously rolling around in it, and enjoying it to its fullest.

Lady Gaga's music videos do all of that. They don't just incorporate porn and sex-culture imagery. They do it with passion, and with respect. They do it with a "fuck you" defiance, not only of sexual repression and demonization, but of sexual trivialization, the notion that sex and the body are petty distractions from the loftier arenas of human expression.

And that makes them both artistically compelling, and totally freaking hot.

(Note: This piece was written before the "Alejandro" video was released. Which is a shame, since it's dirtier and kinkier and queerer than all the other videos put together. I may have to write a review of that video all on its own.)

I realize that I'm late to the Lady Gaga party. (Hey, I'm 48 years old. Cut me some slack.) But I gotta say -- I'm impressed.

If I just listened to her music, I'd only be moderately interested. I think her music is perfectly fun, well- above- average dance pop music. But I've been watching her music videos... and they're making me think that this woman is a force to be reckoned with. (Yes, I realize she doesn't direct her own videos -- but they are clearly collaborations, strongly shaped by her artistic vision, and they're a central part of her public persona.)

And what's striking me about Lady Gaga's music videos is not just how smart they are, or how imaginative, or how lovingly crafted and visually stunning, or how just flat-out funny. What's striking me about Lady Gaga's music videos is how strongly influenced they are by sex culture: by fetish fashion, by sexploitation flicks, and by plain old dirty porn.

What's more, they seem to be strongly influenced by these cultures, not as an outsider, not as someone who's manipulating this imagery to titillate/ shock the audience, but as an insider, someone who's intimately familiar with both sex culture and sexual marginalization. This isn't Britney Spears, using schoolgirl or slavegirl or girl- on- girl imagery to excite her audience without any apparent understanding or affinity for it. Lady Gaga's music videos (coupled with her interviews about her work) show a thoughtful, informed insight into polymorphous perversity. She has an analysis that could easily hold its own in any queer theory/ gender theory/ sex theory forum -- and damn do I love a sexy girl with an analysis! -- and her freak flag is waving high and proud.

In a way that -- if I can be crass for a moment -- makes her videos very functional as porn. I've certainly seen other music videos that turned me on. I can't remember seeing any that made me this hungry to watch them again and again... with a vibrator handy.

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Thus begins my latest "Media Darling" piece for Carnal Nation, Lady Gaga: Music Videos As Porn. To find out more about how Lady Gaga's music videos are influenced by sex culture and porn -- and how they're different from other music videos that use sex to sell -- read the rest of the piece. (And if you feel inspired to comment here, please consider cross-posting your comment to Carnal Nation -- they like comments there, too.) Enjoy!

It starts with a lush, instrumental intro. A surprisingly long instrumental intro. As if the singer were reluctant to begin singing. As if he knows that what he's going to sing will be difficult -- difficult for him to sing, difficult for his audience to hear -- and is putting it off, or maybe just trying to cushion the blow. As if he knows that once he begins singing, he won't be able to take it back.

The intro is disjointed at first, with a loose, jagged rhythm, and a melody that wanders in and out of harmony and dissonance. Then it gradually picks up cohesion, and motion. Like a mind making itself up, and gathering up the courage to speak. It takes a series of deep musical breaths, lingering for a moment... and another moment... and then just one moment longer.

And then the voice begins.

You've heard the story
You know how it goes
Once upon a garden
We were lovers with no clothes
Fresh from the soil
We were beautiful and true
In control of our emotions
'Til we ate the poison fruit
And now it's hard to be, hard to be, hard to be
A decent human being.

Wait just a minute...

And you know that this isn't just another pop record.

David Bazan is the former leader of the rock group Pedro the Lion, known for being just about the only Christian rock group that rock critics liked and took seriously. Bazan's Christianity was deep, serious, and lifelong: he was raised Pentecostal, attended Bible college, and made his faith the centerpiece of his musical career. But in 2004, Bazan had a crisis of faith, and eventually left both his religion and the band. He also, not coincidentally, began to have a serious drinking problem at this time, which severely disturbed both his life and career for several years. He's now in recovery... from both the alcoholism and the religion. (He calls himself an agnostic, not an atheist -- or he did as of this interview -- but he seems to be a pretty strong agnostic, one with whom a lot of atheists will identify.)

And he's made an album about all of it.

I have become completely obsessed with "Curse Your Branches." My wife and co-workers would be deeply grateful for the invention of headphones if they knew how often I was playing it. The story is mesmerizing; the ideas are fascinating; the music is bone-chillingly gorgeous, making me want to both sing and cry. (And I love the fact that Bazan enunciates so clearly; I hate when singers make you guess at what the hell they're singing.) You do have to like this sort of thing: lush, haunting melodies and harmonies; intensely personal, intensely confessional lyrics; all in a firm but gentle rock vibe just a notch harder than slow-core. I realize it may not be to everyone's taste. But if this is remotely in your musical ballpark, I passionately encourage you all to give it a listen.

"Curse Your Branches" brings a refreshing and insightful new angle to many of the classic questions of belief and non-belief. I love Bazan's take on God's final reply to Job:

When Job asked you the question
You responded, "Who are you
To challenge your creator?"
Well if that one part is true
It makes you sound defensive
Like you had not thought it through
Enough to have an answer
Like you might have bit off more than you could chew.

I'd never thought of it that way -- but Bazan is right. When I first read Job, I was furious at what a half-assed answer God gave at the end of it. I'd heard my whole life that Job was the Bible's answer to the question of why there's suffering, I was really curious to see what it had to say... and this was the best God could come up with? "I am the great and powerful Oz! Who the hell are you, puny human? You will respect my authoritah!" Bazan's take on this is brilliantly perceptive. He's absolutely right: the answer to Job does sound like God was just pulling the answer out of his ass. Like he'd never seriously thought about the question. Like he'd been torturing Job for no good reason, just to win a bet with Lucifer, and had never really thought about why he was doing it... or whether it was the right thing to do. Or whether anything he did was the right thing to do.

And I love the fact that Bazan looks at the classic problem of evil, not as the question of why there's evil out there in the world, but as the question of "why it's hard to be a decent human being." It's so easy for humans to position evil as something outside ourselves, something that has nothing to do with us. But Bazan has hit the nail on the head. We all have the potential to do evil, and we all act on that potential more than we should. The question of evil isn't, "Why is there all that bad evil out there, evil that we have to suffer from through no fault of our own?" The question is, "Why is it hard for us to be decent human beings?"

Interestingly -- for godless listeners as well as for believers -- Bazan makes it clear that his questioning and eventual relinquishing of his faith are deeply rooted in the values he learned as a Christian. He touches on this in "When We Fell," when he sings: "If my mother cries when I tell her what I have discovered/ Then I hope she remembers she taught me to follow my heart." And it comes out vividly in the heartbreakingly brave "Bearing Witness," in which he frames his disavowal of his faith as part of his religious tradition:

Though it may alienate your family
And blur the lines of your identity
Let go of what you know and honor what exists
Son, that's what bearing witness is
Daughter, that's what bearing witness is.

Yes. When I talk about how deeply I treasure reality, and how much more important it is than my own petty wishful thinking about the world... that's what I'm getting at.

But what I like best about "Curse Your Branches," and what I think makes it such an important listen for atheists and other non-believers, is how vividly it expresses the pain that Bazan went through with his deconversion. The album is wrenchingly honest about the sadness and loss, the disorientation and bewilderment, the alcoholism, the struggle to re-define himself and his place in the world, that Bazan went through when he left his religion. It reminds me a little bit of Julia Sweeney's "Letting Go of God" performance piece: it's not a series of godless arguments or ideas, but an intimate, intensely emotional story about one person's experience with losing their religion.

A little while back, The Chaplain wrote an incisive and hilarious piece on what she called the Boyfriend Jesus: Christian songs that sing about Jesus as if he were an object of romantic and even erotic love. "Curse Your Branches" is a little like that. But instead of being love songs to God, it's a breakup album. It took me a couple of listens to realize that, whenever it seems like Bazan is singing to a wife or a lover, he's almost always actually singing to God. When he sings about drinking "to hopefully forget about you"; when he sings that "When I called you from Atlanta/ You refused to speak"... he's singing about God: the God he's questioning, the God he's giving up, the God he finally let go of.

Which makes you realize what a strange and difficult breakup deconversion is. Bazan -- and millions of other former believers -- had a deeply personal relationship with God. A relationship that ended, not when he realized that things weren't working out, but when he realized that the other person didn't exist. Wasn't there. Was entirely made up in his head.

There's no other breakup like this. It can cut the ground of your reality out from under you, in every which way imaginable. It doesn't just force you to rethink your entire future without this person. It forces you to redefine your entire past with them. Try to imagine what divorce would be like if it meant realizing that your spouse of many years was a figment of your imagination -- that your entire history with them was an illusion -- and you'll get a sense of what this might feel like.

And this may be what makes this album most valuable to atheists. It's a moving reminder of just exactly how difficult giving up religion can be, what an emotional wrench it often is: not just because it means giving up family and friends and social support, but because it means giving up a relationship with the single most important being of your entire life. I never had this sort of belief; even when I was a believer, I never believed in a personal God with whom I had a relationship. Hearing what this relationship was like for Bazan -- and what it was like to let it go -- helps me have more compassion for believers who are desperately trying to hang on to their beliefs. And it helps me have more patience when I'm engaging with them.

It's important, I think, for the godless to remember this: when we ask people to question their religion, we're actually asking a lot. Atheism can be full of meaning and happiness, great comfort and great joy, and most atheists I know are thrilled to have taken that step and to be on the other side. But the process of coming out into atheism can be painful and difficult, and it's more so for some people than for others. When we ask people to question their faith, we need to remember this. We need to be patient with believers who are questioning their beliefs. And we need to work harder on making godlessness a safe place to land when believers finally do let go.

"Curse Your Branches" is a thoughtful, touching, inspiring reminder of all of this. And it's a freaking gorgeous rock album to boot. I'm thrilled to have discovered it. I'm intensely grateful to everyone in this blog and on Facebook who told me about it. And I'm recommending it passionately to everyone.

It was at the Edwardian Ball. Quick bit of background: That's not Edwardian as in King Edward VII, but as in the artist Edward Gorey, known for his finely detailed, hilariously ghoulish depictions of Victoriana, Edwardiana, and '20s flapperdom. The Edwardian Ball started years ago as a little nightclub gig held in honor of Gorey by the self-described "pagan lounge" band Rosin Coven, and has mushroomed into a massive, magnificent, weekend-long event, with live music, ballroom dancing, costumes, art, exhibitions, absinthe cocktails, trapeze performances, weird taxidermy displays, and more. It's where the Goth, steampunk, ballroom, and historical recreation society scenes collide in a magnificent explosion, and it seems to have become one of the "can't miss" events for all these cultures in the Bay Area.

I love it passionately. Ingrid and I never miss it if we can possibly avoid it. And last night, I had an epiphany about why.

The Edwardian Ball is a near-perfect example of what I think of as the atheist meaning of life.

When you don't believe in God or an afterlife -- when you don't think that the meaning of your life is determined by a perfect divine force, and when you think that humanity is just a tiny, fragile, absurdly mortal fragment in the immensity of space and time -- you have to seriously rethink the whole question of what life means. The meaning of life isn't pleasing God and going to Heaven, or perfecting your soul for your next reincarnation, or working towards the enlightenment of the World-Soul, or anything like that. And humanity isn't a singularly beloved creation with a special destiny. We're just an unusually complex biochemical process on one small rock whizzing around one nondescript star in one of billions of galaxies. And when that star goes Foom in a few billion years, that biochemical process is destined to go Foom along with it, with no traces left but a few bits of space junk floating in the vast emptiness of the universe.

The Edwardian Ball looks at all this, and says, "Let's celebrate.

"And let's connect.

"Let's spend hours putting together magnificent outfits, so other people can look at them and go 'Oo!' Let's spend years learning and practicing and playing music, so other people can dance and be happy. Let's spend years learning and practicing and performing trapeze and acrobatics, so other people can gaze in astonishment and admiration. This is what we have to work with: the matter on this little planet, the energy from this average star, this tiny lifespan before each of us dies, this not- much- longer lifespan of the planet before humanity is boiled into space. What can we do with it? What are some of the strangest, funniest, most beautiful patterns we can work this matter and energy into before we have to go?"

The Edwardian Ball is one of my favorite examples of Stone Soup culture; of people who know that the party will be more fun if they bring their share of it. It isn't just about hearing other people' music, watching other people's stage shows, looking at other people's art. Everywhere I looked, people were dressed to the nines: in rigorously accurate historical costumes, in fanciful imaginings of fictional history, in elegant formal dress, in irreverent and hilarious re-interpretations of formal dress, in complicated technological marvels, in artfully lascivious displays of flesh, in elaborate configurations of black on black on black. And people were dancing, creating a delightful whirlpool of giddy, ridiculous glamour whizzing around the dance floor. The audience was as much a part of the event as the performers. This event is not about sitting back passively and waiting to be entertained. It's about participating -- being part of the show.

Which is exactly what I think of as the atheist meaning of life.

When I'm in a despondent mood, I sometimes get depressed about the "closed circle" nature of human endeavor. I'm not naturally a very Zen, "in the moment" kind of person; I'm ambitious, forward thinking, and I like to think of my affect on the world as possibly having some life beyond my immediate reach and extending past my death. It sometimes makes me sad to remember that, even if I mysteriously became the most famous and influential person in the history of the planet, it's still a closed circle -- because life on Earth is a closed circle, and there's no God or World-Soul to carry my thoughts and experiences into infinity. Like the replicant Roy Batty says in Bladerunner: "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."

The Edwardian ball reminds me, "So what? So what if you're spending hours on your outfit just to be seen and admired by a couple thousand other people, whose outfits you're also admiring? So what if you're working to make life a skosh more joyful for people who'll be dead in a few decades anyway, and whose descendants will be boiled into the sun in a few billion years? Don't those people matter? And don't you matter? The odds against you personally having been born at all are beyond astronomical. Beating your breast in despair because you're going to die someday is like winning a million dollars in the lottery and complaining because it wasn't a hundred trillion. You're here now -- and those other people are here now. Experience your life... and connect with theirs. Even if it's just to spend a moment admiring the marvelous outfit they spent hours putting together."

The Edwardian ball reminds me that permanence is not the only measure of consequence or value. The Edwardian ball reminds me that, as fragile and transitory as they are, experience and consciousness are freaking miracles. And the fact that we can share our experiences and connect our consciousnesses, even to the flawed and limited degree that we do, is beyond miraculous.

Let's participate. Let's be part of the show.

And here's the final thing that struck me this year about the Edwardian Ball: All this celebration and magnificent silliness isn't done by ignoring death.

Quite the contrary. Images of death are all over the Edwardian Ball. There are elaborate dioramas of animal skeletons and bizarre examples of the art of taxidermy. There are skulls and other death symbols incorporated into costumes all over the dance floor, and into the art all over the theater. The stage show this year was an elaborately costumed acrobatic/ trapeze interpretation of Edward Gorey's "The Evil Garden"... a story in which the characters are strangled by snakes, eaten by carnivorous plants, and carried off by giant moths.

This event is not about dealing with death by pretending it isn't real or shoving it onto the back burner. This is about dealing with death by transforming it into art, and costume, and ghoulish humor. This is about dealing with death as if it were an urgent To Do reminder. This is about dealing with death by incorporating it into life.

I'm not saying everyone who attends or creates the Edwardian Ball is an atheist. It would surprise me tremendously to find that that was true. I'm saying that for me, as an atheist, the meaning of life is to participate in it as fully as I possibly can; and to connect with others as richly as I can; and to minimize suffering and maximize joy to the greatest degree that I can, for myself and anyone I can connect with. Sometimes that means staying up until four in the morning writing about atheism and sex. Sometimes it means singing the James K. Polk song to my best friend's new baby. Sometimes it means doing copywriting and website maintenance for a hippie/ punk/ anarchist publisher and book distributor. Sometimes it means cramming twenty people into our apartment for a sit-down Christmas Eve dinner. Sometimes it means going to see our friend's co-worker's band as a dutiful favor, and becoming obsessed fans overnight (how we discovered Rosin Coven in the first place). Sometimes it means donating money to earthquake relief in Haiti.

And sometimes it means dressing up like a character in an elegantly ghoulish fictional world, drinking absinthe cocktails, and waltzing the night away with my beloved wife, in a ballroom full of taxidermied animals and beautiful nerds who spent hours on their costumes.

So there I was at a holiday party I go to every year, a party at which the singing of Christmas carols is a central feature. And yes, I go to this party voluntarily. I love Christmas, and I'm one of those freaks of nature who actually likes Christmas music. (As long as it's not drippy Muzak versions being forced into your ears at the supermarket.) And this party takes a very irreverent attitude towards the whole thing, with an entertaining emphasis on the more gruesome and depressing carols ("Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying/Sealed in the stone cold tomb"), and lots of nerdy song parodies. (The Christmas-themed "Bohemian Rhapsody" and the H.P. Lovecraft ones are the best.)

So there we were, lustily singing "Children, Go Where I Send Thee," one of those endless counting songs (here's a nice version of it on YouTube if you don't know how it goes), and we were getting silly about the endlessness of it all ("I'm gonna send thee 127 by 127" ), when somebody -- it may even have been me -- chimed in with, "I'm gonna send thee pi by pi..."

And a song was born.

Or rather, a song is being born. Here's the current draft. Suggestions for new verses or revisions on these verses are welcomed. Quick ground rules: The numbers have to be actual numbers: I regretfully rejected c ("c for the speed of li-ight"), as it's a constant that would change depending on the units of measurement being used. They do not, however, have to be real numbers. Hence, i and aleph (yes, it should be "aleph null," but that doesn't scan, so suck it up). And I looked it up, and the concept of imaginary numbers seems to have been born in Renaissance Italy. Woo-hoo!

Geek Girls, Go Where I Send Thee

Geek girls, go where I send thee
How shall I send thee?
I'm gonna send thee i by i
i for the 'maginary
Was born in Renaissance Italy

Geek girls, go where I send thee
How shall I send thee?
I'm gonna send thee phi by phi
Phi for the golden ratio
i for the 'maginary
Was born in Renaissance Italy

(Repeat, with these additions)

e for the logarithm
Pi for the perfect circle
Google for the hundred zeroes
Aleph for the weird infinities

Fishnet has a new story up! The online erotic fiction magazine I'm editing, Fishnet, has a new story up for you to enjoy. It's titled Open Chords, by Craig J. Sorensen, and here's the teaser:

It’s in a dive of a bar that I find Johnny Tyger. What a stupid stage name. His ridiculously long and thick digits form chords in the most awkward ways. And yet, as I watch him play, I lose sight entirely of the vivid discussion, an emerging and innovative system for rating oral sex performances, that my girlfriends are engaged in.

Like a lot of sex-positive sex writers, I spend a lot of time ranting and venting about things in our sexual culture that I don't like.

Today, I want to do something different. Instead of bitching about the sexual culture we have, I'd like to present my vision for the sexual culture I'd like to see.

And the best way I can say it is to put it in a metaphor.

I would like us to treat sexuality -- and differences in sexualities -- much the same way we treat music.

We have a basic acceptance of the idea that different people like different kinds of music. We may strongly dislike the music other people like. We may even make some unfair personal judgments about the kind of person who likes, say, opera, or country, or rap music, or Barry Manilow. But as long as people aren't forcing their music on us, we accept -- even if grudgingly -- their basic right to listen to whatever music they like.

I'd like to see us do the same with different sexual tastes. If people are personally grossed out by homosexuality, or SM, or furries, or whatever, I certainly would recognize their right to their gross-out. I just want people to see their gross-outs as an aesthetic judgment and not a moral one.

We understand that some people don't care about music very much... and that some people care about it a great deal. We understand that some people care about music so much that they make it a central aspect of their lives: collecting music, reading about music, writing about music, playing music, watching musical performances, seeing music as a central source of inspiration and consolation in their lives, forming friendships and relationships with other people that are focused on music... even, perhaps, making a living at it. And we understand that for some people, music is just not that big a deal: they enjoy it, but they don't go out of their way to make a big place for it in their lives.

I'd like to see us have the same understanding about sex. I'd like to see us treat people who like sex a lot and are very interested in it as... well, as people who like sex a lot and are very interested in it. Not as moral degenerates, not as selfish indulgers of our own petty whims, not as dangerous or pathetic addicts unable to control our base impulses... but as people whose interest in this basic human activity happens to be greater than average. (And for all of us sex fiends: I'd like to see us have a similar understanding about people who aren't as interested in sex as we are.)

We understand that people's tastes in music change over time. We don't expect people to like the same music they did when they were in high school or college; and while many people do stay mostly interested in the music of their youth, we understand that many other people continue to explore different kinds of music throughout their lives, and may even find their preferences changing entirely over time. And we understand that some people like a wide variety of musical styles... while other people's tastes tend to stay within one genre.

I'd like to see us have the same understanding about sex. I'd like to see us recognize and accept that people's desires, even our basic orientations, can change over time, and understand that not everyone stays slotted in the same sexual category for their entire lives. When gay or lesbian people decide they're bi; when bi people decide they're really more straight or gay; when vanilla folks decide they'd like to try spanking; when committed polyamorists decide they want to be monogamous for a while... I'd like us to recognize it as the natural changes people go through in life. (If it affects us personally -- if it's our lover or spouse who suddenly announces that they're into men or spanking or monogamy -- of course our reactions are going to be different. But if it doesn't, I'd like us to see it as interesting, but also as basically none of our business.)

In relationships, we often see music as one of the main bonds between us. When we get involved with someone new, we get excited about sharing the music we know about with our new loved one, and about discovering the music they like that we don't know about. We sometimes have conflicts with our honeys over differences in musical tastes, especially early in a relationship; but we talk about it, joke about it, rib each other about it, find ways to enjoy our differences as well as our common ground. And as our relationships grow, we often explore new music together.

I'd like us to see sex the same way. I'd like for sex to be something couples can comfortably talk about, and laugh about. I'd like for couples to be as curious about their sexual differences as they are comfortable with their sexual similarities... not just early on in relationships, but as things grow and change. I'd like for couples to see sex as something that matters, something that's worth working on. And if a couple has differences in what kinds of sex they like, or how much they even care about sex, I'd like for their friends and support systems and society in general to see both partners' tastes and desires as equally valid and important.

And finally:

We understand -- or at least, we're beginning to understand -- that music is a basic human activity, maybe even a basic human need. We understand that music exists in all human societies, and has existed in human society for tens of thousands of years. We understand -- or we're beginning to understand -- that music is a fundamental part of how our brains and our minds operate. We see music as an activity that is both necessary and joyful, a vital social bond, something that connects us to our history and projects us into our future.

I'd like us to see sex the same way. I'd like us to see sex as something that we couldn't possibly get rid of, and wouldn't want to get rid of even if we could. I'd like us to recognize that sex is one of the most fundamental ways that our minds are wired, one of the chief lenses through which we view the world... and not only recognize this fact, but accept it, and even celebrate it. I'd like us to see sex as one of the great joys, inspirations, consolations, forms of communication, forms of connection, and just pure forms of entertainment that the human race has. I'd like us to remember that sex is a link that connects us to the chain of human history: the way we got into this world, and -- for many of us, anyway -- one of the chief ways that part of us of will live on after we die.

And I'd like us to give it some gol-darned respect.

I understand that this analogy isn't perfect. (No analogy is. That's sort of the nature of analogies: they compare things that are different.) Most notably, sex has more potential than music to cause harm: from sexually transmitted infections to unwanted pregnancies, from jealous rages to broken hearts. Except for deafness, irritated neighbors, advertising jingles, and neo-Nazi death metal or the like, music just doesn't have the same power to fuck people up. And sex is a more primal desire than music: way more prominently positioned in our brains by evolution, and a whole lot older to boot. It's probably always going to be more charged, more emotionally loaded, than music will ever be.

My health problems are mostly cleared up -- thanks to everyone for the kind thoughts! But now I'm going out of town to visit friends for the holiday weekend. I'll try to blog when I'm away, but I can't promise anything: this blasted blog break may have to go on a couple/few more days. (Driving me up a tree, I tell you. I hate not blogging.)

So in the meantime, let's play a game! There's a trope in popular songs that's been tickling me recently, and I'm trying to come up with more examples of it. It's the "Inappropriate Disclosure to Service or Retail Personnel" trope, in which the singer of the song tells the sad/ hopeful story of his or her love life to postal carriers, airline ticketing agents, telephone operators, and other government or commercial representatives who almost certainly care not about the singer's love life, even in the slightest amount.

The quintessential example may be Please Mr. Postman, originally by The Marvelettes, covered by The Carpenters, The Beatles, and probably everyone else on Loki's green earth, including Captain Beefheart and Snoop Dogg:

Please Mister Postman, look and see
(Oh yeah)
If there's a letter in your bag for me
(Please, Please Mister Postman)
Why's it takin' such a long time
(Oh yeah)
For me to hear from that boy of mine

There must be some word today
From my boyfriend so far away
Pleas Mister Postman, look and see
If there's a letter, a letter for me

I've been standin' here waitin' Mister Postman
So patiently
For just a card, or just a letter
Sayin' he's returnin' home to me

Adding to the entertaining inappropriateness of the disclosure, we have the bonus inappropriateness of blaming the service personnel for the emotional distress ("So many days you passed me by/ See the tears standin' in my eyes/ You didn't stop to make me feel better/ By leavin' me a card or a letter"). Giving the song, from the postal carrier's viewpoint, that extra piquant touch of annoyance.

Then we have The Letter, originally by the Box Tops, covered by Joe Cocker:

Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane,
Ain't got time to take a fast train.
Lonely days are gone, I'm a-goin' home,
'Cause my baby just a-wrote me a letter.

Well, she wrote me a letter
Said she couldn't live without me no mo'.
Listen mister can't you see I got to get back
To my baby once a-mo'--anyway...

Dude: The agent at the airline ticket counter doesn't care why you want the ticket. They just need to know what city you're going to, and if you have any baggage to check, and if any people unknown to you have given you items to carry.

Bus driver, please look for me
'Cause I couldn't bear to see what I might see
I'm really still in prison, and my love she holds the key
A simple yellow ribbon's what I need to set me free
I wrote and told her please:

-- in which the singer seeks a sympathetic ear from, of all people, the prison bus driver.

Operator, oh could you help me place this call
You see the number on the matchbook is old and faded
She's livin' in L.A.
With my best old ex-friend Ray
A guy she said she knew well and sometimes hated

Isn't that the way they say it goes
But let's forget all that
And give me the number if you can find it
So i can call just to tell them I'm fine and to show
I've overcome the blow
I've learned to take it well
I only wish my words could just convince myself
That it just wasn't real
But that's not the way it feels

This one wins some sort of prize for "Highest Ratio of Inappropriate Disclosure to Actual Request for Service." And Croce definitely gets bonus points for spending two verses and two choruses telling the operator all about his sad love life... and then changing his mind and deciding he doesn't want to place the phone call after all.

So what other ones am I missing? I know I'm forgetting some important and obvious ones: I know, for instance, that there have got to be songs about inappropriate disclosure to train conductors and other railway personnel. Help me out, y'all!

BTW, I'm going to impose an arbitrary limit here, and rule out disclosures to bartenders. In theory because it could be argued that listening to people drone on about their love lives is an implicit part of a bartender's job; but mostly for the practical reason that if we don't rule out bartenders, we'll be here all day. Let's play!

I keep thinking about this question of how to get older without turning into a crank. And today, I want to talk about one of the methods I've long used in my attempts to avoid crankery. It's a fairly simple one, at least in theory:

Listen to music that's being made now.

My rule is this: I don't let myself just listen to music that was recorded when I was in college and my early twenties (or earlier). I make a conscious effort to listen to at least some music that's being made now, by musicians and bands who are still alive and still working. (And no, reunion tours don't count.)

But for some reason, that can be a hard thing for people to do.

I was just reading the comic collection R. Crumb Draws the Blues. (Conflict of interest alert: it's published by the company I work for.) In a couple of pieces, Crumb was waxing nostalgic about how great old folk and old blues and old jazz and old country music was -- all well and good, I heartily support those sentiments. He was ranting about how music has become professionalized, something an audience listens to rather than something a culture engages in -- again, sentiments I largely share. In fact, one of the big reasons I'm a folk nerd is how strongly I feel about people making their own music and other art as a way of resisting homogenized corporate culture.

But he was also ranting about how universally horrible modern music was. And that, I have no truck with. I love R. Crumb, I like this book, and I certainly respect the guy's cred on the topic of old- time music. But I think he completely missed the boat here.

And I want to talk about what that boat is, and why it's important.

The Crumb piece reminded me of a comment Dave Barry once made. I forget now what the piece was about... but the comment was something along the lines of (I'm paraphrasing here), "Music made in the '70s is all crap. The music I listened to in the '60s... now, that was great music. But '70s music, it's just this bland, banal junk."

And I was gobsmacked by how ignorant and out- of- touch this was. Yes, the '70s were the decade of Bread and America and Hall & Oates. But some amazing music was made in the '70s. I mean, the '70s was when punk happened. The Clash, the Boomtown Rats, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Stranglers... all '70s bands. And not just punk. David Bowie, Neil Young, Talking Heads... '70s. Some of these folks got their start in the '60s, and some had careers that extended into the '80s... but they were making some of their best music right in the heart of the supposedly banal '70s.

And some seriously crap music was being made in the '60s. Sure, you can wax nostalgic about the brilliant cutting- edge music made in 1967. You wanna know what the Number One hit song of 1967 was? "To Sir With Love."

Which brings me to my first major point. I think there are two things that make it easy to think everything was better in the good old days. There's Sturgeon's Law -- and there's the filtering process of time.

But time has a tendency to filter out the crap. We don't listen to the mediocre 18th century operas; we don't read the mediocre 19th century novels; we don't watch the mediocre silent movies. We listen to Mozart, read Jane Austen, watch Buster Keaton. We listen to Janis Joplin and The Who. "To Sir With Love"? Not so much.

It's not a perfect filtering process. Some good stuff gets filtered out; some mediocre crap gets through the screen. But on the whole, we let the crap get swallowed into the maw of history, and hang onto the good stuff. Which makes it very, very easy to mistakenly think that the operas and novels and movies and popular songs of the old days were so much better than any of the crap they're making today.

And we tend to hang on to the good stuff in our memories as well. If we have fond memories of our youths or our college days or whatever, we tend to remember the good music and so on from those days... and conveniently forget how much dreck was around back then. And since it takes a certain amount of effort, and you need to sort through a fair amount of dreck, to find good music or whatever being made now, it's way too easy to just keep listening to the stuff that we know is good and that we know we like.

Which brings me to my next point.

There's a Jonathan Richman song, "Summer Feeling," that captures almost perfectly what I'm getting at. The song is about the giddy, exuberant, irresponsible- in- the- best- sense- of- the- word freedom of youth: childhood, or college, or whatever youth you had that you loved. And it's about how important it is to hang on to some of that feeling and to re-create it here and now... and how poisonous and sad it is to just let yourself be haunted by memories and lost opportunities. (For the usually chipper Jonathan Richman, the song is kind of a downer.)

And there's a verse that goes like this:

When even fourth grade starts looking good
Which you hated
And first grade's looking good too
Overrated
And you boys long for some little girl that you dated
Do you long for her or for the way you were?

Do you long for her, or for the way you were?

Do you long for the music... or do you long for who you were when you were first listening to the music?

And when you long for that feeling, do you try to find something happening here and now that makes you feel that way? Or do you just listen to the music that used to make you feel that way?

Which brings me -- somewhat harshly, I'll admit -- to my real point.

I think nostalgia is the easy way out.

I think it's way too easy to just reflexively say, "Music/ life/ whatever was so much better back in the old days... but those days can never be recaptured, they're gone for good. So instead of trying to find music or movies or whatever stuff is good now, I'm just going to keep listening to stuff from the old days that I know I like. And I'm going to gradually sink into old crankhood, and gripe about the world instead of taking part in it or trying to understand it."

It's a cop-out. It's a way of evading responsibility for participating in your life, and in the world -- here, and now. It's an excuse for avoiding the risks and the emotional rollercoaster of engaging with the world around you. It's an excuse for sitting on the sidelines and watching the world go by. This modern world sucks -- so why bother?

Well, I'm going to go out on a limb here: This modern world does not suck. Like Jonathan Richman from another song, I'm in love with the modern world. I love literary graphic novels, and slow-core, and feminism, and the atheist blogosphere, and queer contra dancing, and readily available legal pornography, and organic produce delivered to my door, and same-sex marriage, and email, and "The Office," and being openly bisexual without fear. Of course there are disappointments and horrors in the modern world. You don't have to tell me that. Some are the same old disappointments and horrors we've had since the dawn of humanity; some are brand new to our time. But there are joys in the modern world as well: some are the same old joys we've had since the dawn of humanity, and some are brand new to our time.

And the modern world has one enormous advantage over the old days: It's the world I live in. It's the world I can take part in, now, today. The old days had their plusses and minuses (and of course I'll enjoy their plusses if I can); the modern world has its plusses and minuses. But the modern world is a parade I can march in. Nothing beats that.

You know what? If what you truly love is old- time bluegrass or '60s psychedelia? That's cool. It might behoove you to check out some modern music anyway -- there are contemporary musicians doing some interesting interpretations of bluegrass and psychedelia -- but life is too short to listen to music that you hate. There are wonderful things from the past, and by all means, we should be enjoying them and preserving them and keeping them alive.

But we shouldn't treat our aesthetic preferences as a moral imperative. We shouldn't pretend that it's a serious life philosophy to gripe about kids these days and their crazy fashions. We shouldn't act as if shutting out the modern world somehow makes us discerning and superior.

And if we catch ourselves reflexively saying, "(X) was so much better in the old days, they just don't make (X) like they used to," I think it's worth making an effort to remember all the generic, banal crap that was being cranked out in the old days... and to pay attention to the good stuff being made right now.

P.S. Right now, my favorite band is Low, this gorgeous slow-core band with harmonies that send literal physical chills through my body. I'm also listening to Varttina, a band from Finland that marries eerie Eastern European folk harmonies with a peppy pop sensibility; and the Mountain Goats, a "guy with a guitar" project that's somehow both lush and spare; and Nick Cave, who feeds my inner morbid brooder; and Joanna Newsom, with her profoundly strange voice that on first hearing sounds like a cat wailing and on second hearing sounds like an avant- garde angel; and Radiohead, who walk that beautiful thin line between accessible straight-up rock and edgy industrial unlistenability. Just for starters. What music being made today are you listening to, and what do you like about it? And on the larger question -- what specific techniques have you developed for avoiding crankhood and staying in touch with the world as you get older?

There are certain actors and musicians and other celebrities -- not many, but a handful -- who, solely because of their religious beliefs and the way they choose to express them -- I can no longer stand to watch.

And I'm not sure if I'm okay with that. I'm trying to parse out the difference between religious bigotry (which I have serious problems with), and being grossed out by someone's ideas and opinions and general demeanor (which seems pretty reasonable). Then you add in the whole "should an artist's personal beliefs affect your opinion of their art, and if so, how and to what degree" question... and the whole thing gets very complicated indeed.

The most obvious example of this, for me, is Tom Cruise. I used to like Tom Cruise a fair amount: my take on him was that he did a lot of dreck, but when he sunk his teeth into a decent script and got a director who didn't give a shit about his boyish charm, he could do seriously good work. I found him compelling in "Eyes Wide Shut," I thought he was the one genuinely interesting thing about "Rain Man" (a movie that I generally loathed), and his performance in "Magnolia" was nothing short of masterful. I knew he was a Scientologist, and I found that ooky.... but if you refuse to see any movies or TV or music made by Scientologists, you'd be pretty cut off from American popular culture. So I managed to not care about it all that much.

But ever since his fabled series of icky Scientological outbursts, I've been unable to look at his smug little face without feeling nauseous. If I'm flipping channels and come across "Jerry Maguire" or "Interview with the Vampire" -- movies I used to like a fair amount -- I now just keep on flipping. I have a moment of thinking, "Oh, yeah, I like that movie, I could watch that for a while"... and then I remember that Tom Cruise is in it, and I flinch, and I walk on by.

Another example is Mel Gibson. I never liked him as much as I liked Tom Cruise... but I've always cited the first "Lethal Weapon" movie in my list of "action movies with some genuine substance," and I always remembered that he used to be a real actor, back in the days of "Gallipoli" and "The Year of Living Dangerously." He pretty much had already lost me with the "open incitement to gay- bashing" that was "Braveheart," not to mention his other examples of vile homophobia... but the grotesquery of "The Passion of the Christ," and his drunken anti-Semitic rant, have made me unable to contemplate his visage without wanting to yak.

And finally, before I move on: Ben Stein. Again, it's not like I loved the guy. I knew, for instance, that he was a rabid anti-choice advocate, not to mention a speechwriter for Nixon, and any project he was at the center of (like that show "Win Ben Stein's Money"), I would have no truck with it. But if he had a bit part in some movie, I could cope. Now, ever since he got involved in the "Expelled" fiasco, I can't. I can't even see his face without being viscerally repulsed. I've never seen "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," and now I think I probably never will.

And I'm trying to figure this out.

The thing is... it's not really consistent. There are plenty of actors/ musicians/ other celebrities and artists with religious beliefs I find appalling or just silly, and I can enjoy their work with a minimum of retching. John Travolta, for instance. I know that he's a big-time Scientologist. I don't love this fact. But it doesn't get in the way of my enjoying "Pulp Fiction" or "Primary Colors." And I didn't stop watching "The Simpsons" when I found out that Nancy Cartwright was a Scientologist.

So what's the difference?

For me, a lot of it is how hard-core the icky religious beliefs are. John Travolta, for instance, is a pretty high- profile Scientologist -- he even made that stupid L. Ron Hubbard sci-fi movie -- but he also apparently does that inconsistent compartmentalization thing that drives atheists nuts when we're debating believers but that also makes peaceful co-existence possible. (Scientology has pretty strict strictures against homosexuality... and yet Travolta made "Hairspray." And has insisted in interviews, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Scientology isn't really homophobic. Which makes me want to smack him across the head and scream, "It is so!"... but given a choice between a believer who submerges their own moral compass and lets it be subsumed by their religion, and a believer who relies on their own functioning moral compass and tries half-assedly to contort their religion around it, I'll take the latter any day.)

But a lot of the difference is how central someone's icky religion is to their public persona. Nancy Cartwright, for instance, hasn't become the central spokesmodel in a documentary about how criticism of Scientology is de facto bigoted censorship, the way Ben Stein did. She hasn't produced a movie putting the vilest aspects of Scientology on gruesome display as if they were something to be proud of, the way Mel Gibson did. And when I've seen her do interviews, she doesn't talk at length about Scientology and how it proves that psychiatry is a fraud. She talks about The Simpsons.

I'm not sure that's fair, though. Is it really right to punish consistency and adherence to one's ideals, and to reward fickleness and crass "I don't want to piss off the public" pragmatism? This is a question I often face with religion, and I haven't yet come to any resolution about it.

And my list of "flaws that make me retch irrevocably and that I can tolerate" is definitely not fair or rational. Why will icky religious opinions turn me off an artist now, in the same way that icky opinions about women or homosexuality have done for a long time? It's probably nothing more than the fact that I'm thinking about religion more these days. And that's not being consistent, either.

Of course, part of this issue, as Ingrid points out, isn't about how gross the religious beliefs are. It's about how gross the people's behavior is about those beliefs. It's not just that the beliefs of Cruise and Gibson and Stein are repugnant; it's that they've behaved so repugnantly about them, in ways that are dishonest and hateful and contemptuous of others. And that's going to turn me against somebody, regardless of anything to do with religion. As an example in the other direction: Right now, pretty much my favorite band in the world is Low. The members of Low are Mormons. I have pretty strong negative feelings about the Mormon religion, both its tenets and its organization. And yet, I don't transfer those negative feelings onto Low... because to the best of my knowledge, they aren't jerks about their faith. (The last time I saw them play, they used the word "shit" and said they wanted to kill George W. Bush, which makes me [a] like them and [b] think that whatever their religious beliefs are, it's not your garden- variety Mormonism. Of course, I've found myself shying away from finding out more about the detail's of Low's religious beliefs, for this very reason -- because I don't want to find out something that's going to make me dislike them -- but that's a topic for another post.)

But the problem with that -- the problem with this whole snarly issue, in fact -- is that, as a general theoretical principle, I do think that critique and appreciation of art should usually be separated from opinions about the artist. It's not always possible, and I can think of instances where it's not even desirable... but on the whole, I think it's a goal worth reaching for. It's different when the artist in question is still alive -- when it comes to Wagner, for instance, there's not that soiled, complicit feeling you get from knowing that your money is financing an anti-Semitic creep. But as a rule, I think that rejecting art because you don't like the opinions of the artist is an inhibiting minefield at best, and a serious missing of the point at worst. One of the whole points of art is that it opens your mind to different ways of seeing the world... and that doesn't work if you're only willing to be opened to perspectives you already agree with.

But the thing is? This "I can't stand to watch Tom Cruise" thing isn't a carefully considered ethical and aesthetic choice. It's an emotional response. Even if I came to the conclusion that my visceral rejection of Tom Cruise wasn't fair and I should simply assess him on the basis of his work... I'd still flip past "Jerry Maguire" on the TV with a shudder and a desire to take a shower. The stomach has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing. And life is too short to spend watching actors who make me want to retch. There are plenty of actors who don't. I can live a rich, full life without ever seeing another Tom Cruise movie again.

I do think it's sort of a shame, though. I'd like to see "Gallipoli" or "Magnolia" again. I'd like to see "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" someday. I don't like feeling cut off from entire avenues of art and popular culture just because some of the people involved are jackasses with creepy religious beliefs.

I'm one of those freakish people who actually likes Christmas carols. Not the gloppy, cutesy, "Suzy Snowflake" modern variety so much (although I do have a soft spot for "Silver Bells"), but the soaring, haunting, gorgeous classic ones. "Angels We Have Heard On High," "The Holly and the Ivy," "The Angel Gabriel," that sort of thing.

And one of the things I like about them is how totally freaky some of them are.

There's this annual Christmas party I go to every year (although I had to miss it this year, damn and blast), at which the singing of Christmas carols and other seasonal and not- so- seasonal music is a centerpiece. A few years back, I went on the Internet and pulled together a lyric sheet, so we could actually sing all the songs all the way through instead of tapering off pathetically after the first verse.

And you know what I found? Some Christmas carols are truly gruesome. Startlingly gruesome. Freakishly and hilariously gruesome.

So I thought I should share with the rest of the class.

We start with a classic: the fourth verse of "We Three Kings of Orient Are."

Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom;
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone cold tomb.

I love that one. It rings out so lustily -- especially when a room full of eggnog- tiddly heathens is belting it out.

Then we have this gem: two little lines from the 1865 "Greensleeves" parody rewrite, "What Child Is This":

Nails, spear shall pierce Him through,
The cross be borne for me, for you.

Well, it definitely reminds you of the reason for the season. You can't deny that.

Then we have the lesser- known, but haunting and really quite lovely "Coventry Carol" (here's the tune, in case you don't know it). With this charming third verse:

Herod the king in his raging,
Charged he hath this day,
His men of night, in his own sight,
All children young to stay.

The fourth verse is a charmer, too, although somewhat lacking in the vivid "dead children" imagery:

But the best -- the very, very best, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords of gruesome Christmas carols -- has got to be the "Corpus Christi Carol," a.k.a. "Down In Yon Forest." There are different versions of it, but the one I found when I was putting together the songbook goes like this:

Down in yon forest there stands a hall
(The bells of paradise I heard them ring)
It's covered all over with purple and pall
(And I love my Lord Jesus above anything)

In that hall there stands a bed
It's covered all over with scarlet so red

Under the bed there runs a flood
One half runs water, the other runs blood

On the bed there lies a knight
Whose wounds do drip down both by day and by night

By the bed there lies a hound
Who laps at the blood as it daily drips down

At the bed's foot there grows a thorn
Which ever so blossomed since Jesus was born

(Here's a nifty folk-Goth version of it by my friend Tim Walters and his occasional project Conjure Wife; here's a YouTube video with a more conventional rendition, although for some reason it's lacking the verse about the vampire dog.)

So Merry Christmas, everybody! And in the midst of this terrible, disrespectful, heathenistic War on Christmas, let's all remember the reason for the season: a life of gathering gloom, flesh pierced through with nails and a spear, children slaughtered by a raging king, and -- merriest of all -- a half-blood, half-water river, blood dripping from a wounded knight, and a dog licking up the blood. Let me know if there's any I've forgotten, or any I haven't heard of yet. It's the most wonderful time of the year!

My deepest and most wildly entertained thanks to everyone who participated in the "Old Time Religion" song parody contest. We definitely have some wonderful new verses now to liven up the repertoire at drunken folk-nerd parties. And in a way, you're all winners.

Let's start with the honorable mentions and the runners-up. (FYI, some slight adjustments have been made on a few of these to make them scan perfectly, since I'm a little obsessive- compulsive about scanning.) A very fond honorable mention goes to Tim Walters, for:

Let us bow down to Cthulhu
Most implacable and cruel, who
Always covers me with drool; you
Know that's good enough for me.

Give me that cold slime religion...

FYI, the only reason this verse doesn't get a higher score is that I've heard the verse before (plus it seemed unfair to pick my personal friends as winners). I didn't know Tim wrote it, though; it just sounds like it's part of the canon, which is always a good sign in the folk process. (If you hear anyone say that the folk song/ dance/ tune you've written is very old and nobody knows who wrote it, you know you've arrived...)

More Honorable Mentions to traumerin, for:

Let us bow down to Astarte
Though the Hebrews call her tarty,
She knows how to throw a party,
And that’s good enough for me.

To Charlotte, for:

Let us now worship Minerva
Study with religious fervor
Then go kill those who don't serve her -
Hell, that's wise enough for me!

And finally, we come to the winner. It was hard to pick just one by Cuttlefish; he had somanyexcellentones. But ultimately, me being me, I have to go with this one:

At the Temple of Apollo
Some will lead and some will follow
Some will spit and some will swallow
And that's good enough for me.

The masterful Cuttlefish, Poet Laureate of the Atheosphere, wins his choice of a free copy of any of my three books that he wants: Paying For It, Three Kinds of Asking For It, or Best Erotic Comics 2008. Drop me an email or a comment to let me know which (if any) of these you'd like, Mr. Fish, and I'll ship it off to you pronto.

And thanks to everyone for playing! This has been more fun than a barrel of apologetics, and I can't wait to unleash these at the next drunken folk nerd party.

It's probably funnier if you've seen the movie "Woodstock" (or heard the album); but it should still be a darned good time if you haven't. BTW, the joke doesn't start until about 30 seconds in, but it's worth waiting for and not jumping ahead.

This one should be fun. In fact, I think we can make it into a contest.

It's the pagany folk nerd song parody of "Old Time Religion."

(You know. "Give me that old time religion/ Give me that old time religion/ Give me that old time religion/ It's good enough for me.")

I've loved this ever since I first heard it. Apart from just being silly and fun with many ridiculous rhymes, it's a neat reminder that Christianity really isn't "that old time religion" -- many religions are much, much older. And it has a nice, gentle, "making fun of everyone equally" quality that I'm very fond of.

Technically, I suppose it's not atheist. It's more "pagan/ disrespectful of organized religion." And technically I suppose it's not pop culture, either, unless you consider folk nerd song parodies to be pop culture. But I don't care. The subject of Druids came up at work the other day, and this verse popped into my head, and I decided I had to share with the rest of the class:

Let us worship like the Druids
Running naked through the woo-ids
Drinking strange fermented fluids
And that's good enough for me.

(Give me that old time religion, etc.)

There are about eight hundred thousand verses floating around in the folk nerd world and on the 'Net, but not all of them are gems. Here are a few that I'm particularly fond of:

Let us worship Aphrodite
In her silky see-through nightie
Though she's mean and somewhat flighty
She's good enough for me.

Let us sacrifice to Isis
She will help us in a crisis
And she hasn't raised her prices
And that's good enough for me.

Let us all bow down to Buddha
There's no other God who's cuter
Comes in copper, brass, and pewter
And that's good enough for me.

Let us travel to Valhalla
In Volkswagens, not Impalas
Singing "Deutschland Uber Alles"
And that's good enough for me.

Let us sacrifice to Kali
Let us worship her, by golly
To ignore her would be folly
And that's good enough for me.

Let us worship Zarathustra
Let us worship like we used to
I'm a Zarathustra booster
And that's good enough for me.

This next has always been my favorite:

Let us sacrifice to Loki
He's the old Norse god of chaos
Which is why this verse doesn't rhyme, or scan
And that's good enough for me.

And to show that it's an equal opportunity song parody, there are at least two verses on Christianity:

Let us all bow down to Mary
For she hasn't lost her cherry
And she cures the beri-beri
And that's good enough for me.

Let us worship like the Quakers
(silence)
(silence)
And that's good enough for me.

I wrote the next two myself:

Let us now form up a caucus
So that we may worship Bacchus
For his followers are raucous
And that's good enough for me.

(Alternate last line: "For his followers will fock us...")

Let us sacrifice to Hades
Looking spiffy in his shade-es
He's a devil with the ladies
And that's good enough for me.

My good friend Rebecca wrote this one:

There's a graven image of Ba'al
That I bought for my front ha'al
At the graven image ma'al
And that's good enough for me.

And my good friend Nosmo King wrote this verse, totally on the fly the first time he heard the song, earning the eternal admiration of all the drunken folk nerds at that particular party:

Let us walk the path of Tao
Though it hasn't got much wow
But it's in the here and now
And that's good enough for me.

So now it's your turn! At parties we keep singing the same ones again and again, and we need new ones. Plus we desperately need some from the atheist pantheon of made-up religions, and I'm having a hard time rhyming "flying spaghetti monster" and "invisible pink unicorn." (I'm about halfway there on Russell's Teapot -- something about "It's impossible to see, but" -- but so far I'm failing to come up with a last line.)

As promised a couple of weeks ago. But first, a shout-out to my old friend Max on this one, since it was really his idea.

Back in college, a bunch of us were hanging out, and I was playing "Suzanne" on the guitar (non-ironically, even -- was I ever so young?), and Max started ad-libbing this incredibly mean-spirited, very funny parody of it. I can't remember any of the words to it anymore, but the spirit has lived on in my brain ever since, and I finally stopped trying to remember his words and just came up with my own. (The last line of the chorus is actually Max's -- it's the only one of his I could remember.) I wrote the first verse and the chorus years ago; I wrote the final verse last month.

So here it is: my mean-spirited, hopefully funny song parody of "Suzanne." FYI, I'm skipping the second verse. Yes, I know it's the one about, "And Jesus was a sailor/When he walked upon the water," and it would seem ripe for my evil tongue/ pen/ laptop. But I think song parody is a dish best served in small portions, and two verses plus a chorus seems like oodles already. Enjoy!

Suzanne

Suzanne takes you down
To her place in the Village
You can listen to Bob Dylan
And that goddamn Ravi Shankar
And her Indian print bedspread
Catches dust and makes you sneezy
And she feeds you tea and oatcakes
That come all the way from Brooklyn
And she'll drive you to distraction
With her half-assed Eastern wisdom
And you think she's really batty
But she makes you really horny
And you know you'll get some off her

Chorus:
And you want to shake some sense into
That ditzy spaced-out brainpan
And you think she's really batty
But still you're very sexually attracted to her

Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to her bedroom
She is wearing tie-dye headbands
From this little shop in Chelsea
And her tea tastes just like seaweed
From the stinky New York Harbor
And she shows you all her pottery
From when she went to Hampshire
There are vases shaped like Buddha
There are bongs with little peace signs
She is asking if you like them
And you make your lie convincing
'Cuz you know you'll get some off her.

Anyway, I was thinking about what a folk or pop song would be like if it were about actual dreams. And I haven't shared a song parody here in a while -- and this is one of my favorites. Hence the following. (To the tune of "Joe Hill" by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson, popularized by Joan Baez.)

Joe Hill
by Greta Christina

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
In my old high school hall
He asked about my big math test
And bounced a bright red ball
And bounced a bright red ball.

"I spaced out on my math test, Joe
I'm going to fail," said I.
Then we were in my living room
And Joe began to fly
And Joe began to fly.

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
He looked just like my dad
I offered him a hard-boiled egg
But Joe just looked real sad
But Joe just looked real sad.

I've found the "atheism in pop culture" motherlode, people. It's the Celebrity Atheist List, "an offbeat collection of notable individuals who have been public about their lack of belief in deities."

And it's hilarious.

It's just such a fascinating mish-mosh. I'd be hard pressed to find any other characteristic that all these people have in common, apart from being carbon-based humanoid life forms.

I mean -- Barry Manilow?

Really?

And that's what I like about it. It's such a rich vein of counter-examples to the stereotype of atheists as sad, hopeless, amoral, unpatriotic, self-centered nihilists who only live for ourselves and only live for the moment.

After all, are you really going to call Dave Barry sad and hopeless? Andy Rooney unpatriotic? Studs Terkel nihilistic? Salman Rushdie self-centered and amoral? Did Pat Tillman live only for himself? Does Barbara Ehrenreich live only for the moment?

This weird thing has been happening since I started with the atheist blogging. I'm not happy about it, and I'm wondering if other godless people have experienced it -- and if so, how you've dealt with it.

What's happening is that I don't want to listen to religious music anymore.

When a song about Jesus or God comes up on my shuffle, I feel this cringing, this little internal flinch. And I almost always skip past it.

It didn't used to be that way. I was always able to just listen to the music, and either ignore the words or appreciate them as expressing a common human sentiment I didn't happen to share. Like sad tortured love songs, or murder ballads. Unless the religious content was unusually heavy or actually offensive, I never even thought about it that much.

But since I've been spending so much time writing -- and thinking -- about atheism and religion, my feelings about religious music have become completely different. Not my thoughts, you understand, or my opinions. My thoughts and opinions about religious music are very much what they ever were. It's a purely emotional response. The response is, "This is fucked-up. I don't want to listen to this."

And I don't like it.

Some of my favorite music has religious content. I don't want to not like it. I don't want to flinch when I hear it. Some of the best music ever written is religious music. And there's lots of it. I don't want to be cut off from it all.

It's especially a problem now because it's Christmastime. And while I realize this makes me a total freak, I actually like Christmas carols. A lot of them, anyway. I don't like the sappy Musak versions, or the drippy modern ones like (shudder) "The Little Drummer Boy." But "Joy to the World"? "Angels We Have Heard On High"? "The Angel Gabriel"? That shit rocks!

I don't want to not like Christmas music. I like liking Christmas music. I want to be able to hear it, and sing it, and be happy about it. And as much as I like the secular songs and the parodies, I don't want to be limited to them.

It's not usually a problem if the music is in Latin or something; I can listen to Mozart's "Requiem" happily and joyfully. It's definitely the words that create the problem.

Which clues me in to why I think this is happening. Since I started atheist blogging, I read religious writing all the time. I read more religious writing than I have at any time in my life since I was a religion major in college. Way, way more. I read it, I think about it, I engage with it, I debate it -- on an almost daily basis.

So now, when I hear, "Help me, Jesus, my soul's in your hands," or, "And when from death I'm free, I'll sing on," or, for fuck's sake, "Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel/And ransom captive Israel" (my candidate for the most anti-Semitic Christmas carol ever)... it doesn't make me think of country roads or street-corner choirs or snowy evenings by the tree with my family listening to the Time/Life Christmas record. It makes me think of Michael Behe, and Dinesh D'Souza, and whatever other lackwit is getting up my nose that week. I don't want to sing along. I want to argue.

But I'm really not thrilled about this. I'm very much hoping it's a phase. Again, there's a vast and wonderful world of religious music out there, and I don't want to get annoyed every time I hear it. If I can happily listen to Smokey Robinson sing about loving a girl he doesn't like very much, or Nick Cave sing about committing mass murder, I should bloody well be able to listen Johnny Cash or the Anonymous 4 sing about Jesus.

So I'm wondering: Have any of the godless people reading this blog ever had this happen? Did you get over it, or is it still a problem? How did you deal with it? This is bugging me, and any advice you can give would be greatly appreciated.

Is this the Yuletide?
It's such a mystery
Will I be denied
Or will there be gifts for me?

Come down the stairs
Look under the tree and see...

It's December now, which means it's officially okay for me to start talking about Christmas. (Which I actually do like -- more on that in a separate post.) So here is my annual plug for the very best Christmas song ever:

It's absolutely dead-on. The lyrics, the performance, the production, everything. You will never be able to listen to "Bohemian Rhapsody" again without thinking of it... and without falling into fits of the giggles when you do.

Trust me on this one. Even if you hate Christmas. It is hilarious, and it is fucking brilliant. Just take my word for it.

And if youi like that, here's more Tim-related holiday music. My fave: the gothy, Dead-Can-Dance-ish version of Down In The Forest, described by Tim as "A dark and slightly confused Yuletide nightmare. It has something to do with the Fisher King. Maybe." Enjoy, and Happy Yule!

I really like this song by Nick Cave. It does a beautiful job of tapping into religious emotions and images and language, while still being entirely godless. And I love that it's a pop love song that begins with the line, "I don't believe in an interventionist God." It's from his record "The Boatman's Call," and it goes very much like this:

Into My Arms
by Nick Cave

I don't believe in an interventionist God
But I know darling that you do
But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him
Not to intervene when it came to you
Not to touch a hair on your head
To leave you as you are
And if He felt He had to direct you
Then direct you into my arms

And I don't believe in the existence of angels
But looking at you I wonder if that's true
But if I did I would summon them together
And ask them to watch over you
To each burn a candle for you
To make bright and clear your path
And to walk, like Christ, in grace and love
And guide you into my arms

And I believe in Love
And I know that you do too
And I believe in some kind of path
That we can walk down, me and you
So keep your candle burning
And make her journey bright and pure
That she will keep returning
Always and evermore

I don't actually talk much about the details of the book in this post. But if you haven’t yet read "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" and want to read nothing at all about it until you do, I suggest that you not read it -- especially since we might talk about the book in the comments.

Once upon a time, back in the old days of this blog when we were debating the relative merits of Harry Potter versus Lord of the Rings, I hit upon an analogy that I thought was very apt. I said that Harry Potter was like the Beatles and Lord of the Rings was like Wagner... and that, while I acknowledged that Wagner's music was certainly greater than that of the Beatles by whatever objective standards might exist, I still didn't personally like it. I still found it bombastic and heavy and humorless. I still enjoyed the Beatles more, by several orders of magnitude. And I believed that this was a reasonable and defensible position.

I still do, by the way.

Since then, I've carried this analogy quite a bit further. I think the Harry Potter books are, in fact, a lot like the Beatles -- something that started out as a well-done, tremendously fun, significantly-better-than-average bit of pop fluff that somehow tapped into a deep and wide vein in the culture, and that over time evolved into something more than that, into something that approached art -- often awkwardly and clumsily and with a reach that exceeded its grasp, but nevertheless exploring interesting deep waters with pleasure and skill, and worthy of serious attention and consideration. (While at the same time still hitting that deep vein of pure pop culture fun.)

I even had specific books matched up with specific Beatles albums (although not one-to-one, obviously, since the Beatles made more than seven albums). The first three books are the happy, poppy, early Beatles, with Book Three, "Prisoner of Azkaban," being the pinnacle of that period in the same way that "A Hard Day's Night" is. Book Four, "Goblet of Fire," is the tired, fallow, grinding-it-out, "Beatles for Sale/Help!" low-point.

And Books Five and Six, "Order of the Phoenix/Half-Blood Prince," are the "starting to evolve and come into its own, as something new and worth paying serious attention to" books, a la "Rubber Soul," "Revolver," "Sgt. Pepper," and "White Album." (Ingrid points out that the analogy isn't perfect, since the musical equivalent of the long, rambling, confusing, self-indulgent battle scene at the end of Book Five would be a 17-minute guitar solo from Rush or Yes or Spinal Tap, something the Beatles never did... but on reflection, I think "Magical Mystery Tour" might count).

So ever since I read Book Six, I've been waiting for Book Seven with some trepidation. Would it be "Abbey Road" (the last Beatles album recorded) -- a beautiful, inspired, nearly flawless example of the band at its best, and a grand and fitting note to go out on? Or would it be "Let It Be" (the last Beatles album released) -- a messy, sloppy, kind of sad anticlimax with a few high points?

I'm happy to report that "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" is Abbey Road. All the way.

It's not quite flawless, to be sure. It's certainly heir to many of Rowling's usual foibles, including long awkward exposition passages, important plot points that are confusing or poorly thought-out (the whole thing with the wands at the very very end I thought was total bullshit), and obvious sops to the audience.

But on the whole, I think it's an extremely strong book. It's got action, romance, politics, philosophy, moral complexity, humor... all well-executed and in good balance. It's a serious page-turner -- I pretty much didn't do anything from the time I started it to the time I finished it except sleep, eat, and read. It’s even reasonably tight... well, for a Rowling book, anyway. And while the basic arc of the book is very much what you might expect, there are some serious surprises and shocks along the way.

I want to reserve final judgment until I've had time to let it gel (and until I've re-read it at least once). But right now, a day after finishing it, my initial assessment is: Best book in the series.

I've been paying attention lately to pop culture depictions of atheism. Not so much to the usual dumb stereotypes of atheists -- cynical, hyper-rational, dismissive of emotions, unable to make a leap of faith, yada yada yada -- but to pop culture that seems to be depicting an atheist or atheist-friendly viewpoint.

One that's been leaping out at me lately is the Geraldine Fibbers song "Richard," off their "Lost Somewhere Between The Earth and My Home" CD. The song as a whole is a "devil wreaking entertaining havoc" song, interestingly mashed-up as a lesbian love story with a happy ending. But the second verse is the one that's jumping out at me. At first listen, it plays like your basic obscure, enigmatic, magic realism. But when you remember that "fish" is/are a common symbol for Christ and Christianity, it all falls into place. The verse goes like this:

In an hour and a half the devil was down by the sea
working strange mischief on her bride to be.
Seems the pretty girl was laughing as her world was filled with doubt,
she laughed as her own head was chopped off
and the fish came spilling out.
Watching the fish swim into the sea through a river of red, she said,
"I've been wondering what's been troubling my head.
And I thank you for expelling those irritating pests,
now if you'd slap me back together I'll be at my very best,
and we can go you devil, we can go."

I just love it. Especially the girl laughing as her world is filled with doubt; going "I've been wondering what's been bugging me!" as the fish pour out of her head; and flirting with the devil-girl who cut off her head and emptied the fish out of it. I like this girl, and want to meet her. She's saucy.

When I was in my twenties, it's not that I liked every top 40 recording artist or Top 10 movie. But I pretty much knew who or what most of them were. Now I look at this American Idol montage of celebrities lip-synching to Staying Alive, and I'm lucky if I can identify one out of three. Same with People Magazine. Not only do I not recognize the famous people, I don't even know who they are when it's explained to me. "Oh, she was in 'Five's a Crowd' for a season, and 'Houseboat Surprise,' and that miniature golf movie with Adam Sandler." Huh?

Now usually, my reaction to this has been, "Oh, I'm getting so very very old." I'm 45, and the world of pop culture is passing me by. Pop culture is aimed squarely at the 18-24 set, and I am losing my coolness by the minute. I am already less cool now than I was when I started this post.

But as I was watching this silly American Idol montage, it struck me: There's another reason I don't know who these people are.

I don't care.

When Ingrid and I were planning our wedding, I picked up some bridal magazine at the hairdresser's, and it had all this stuff about what bridesmaid's colors and cake flavors and honeymoon destinations were "in" this year. And I remember thinking, "It's your wedding! What could possibly be less relevant that what's 'in'? Who cares what colors and vacation spots other people like? It's your fucking wedding! What do you like?"

And that's the other side of getting older. As I've gotten older, I've gotten significantly better at just liking the things I like, and not giving a shit about whether they're cool. I like contra dancing, documentaries, cat-eye glasses, graphic novels, spanking porn, comfortable cotton clothing, Richard Dawkins, Harry Potter, atheist bloggers, weightlifting, The Office. And I don't give shit if any of it is on the Vice magazine What's Hot list.

Now, I do resist some things about being a codger. I make a conscious effort, for instance, to listen to at least some music made by bands and musicians who are still playing. I never want to be one of those people who only listens to music they listened to in college... and who insists that popular music has all gone downhill since then. In fact, some of my favorite music -- Radiohead, Iron & Wine, Low, White Stripes, DJ Danger Mouse, Be Good Tanyas, yada yada yada -- is made by performers who are still playing.

And it's not like the twenty-something people I know are mindless pop culture drones. They aren't; no more than I was when I was twenty-something. This isn't about liking or conforming to pop culture. It's about having a baseline familiarity with it. Knowing about it, having an opinion about it, having it be a reasonably big part of the world you walk in. That's what's changed. For me, anyway.

I'm not sure what's the cart and what's the horse. Do older people respond less to pop culture because it isn't aimed at us... or is pop culture not aimed at older people because we don't respond to it as much? The former is at least partly true; what with the whole disposable income thing, and our youth-obsessed culture in which young people set the trends.

But I think the latter may be true as well. Speaking for myself, getting older has meant getting to know myself and what I do and don't like better. And it's meant getting to know the world a little better and what it has to offer. I've seen more of the world's nooks and crannies than I had at 25, enough to have found ones that hold my interest more than the broader cultural brushstrokes. I know the world well enough to know that contra dancing is in it... and I know myself well enough to know that I think contra dancing is wicked cool. And I've wasted enough time in the past -- and have little enough of it left -- to waste any of it caring who Ryan Seacrest is.

A friend asked me to send her the lyrics to this, and I realized I'd never posted it on my blog. It's dedicated to all the hot geek girls I know. Who are legion. You know who you are.

Super Geek
by Greta Christina

She's a very geeky girl
The kind you cheat off of in math class
And she will never let her teachers down
Once she takes her SAT's

She likes the boys in the chess club
She says that Spassky is her favorite
When she makes a move, it's rook takes bishop, check-mate
She's very hard to beat

The girl is pretty bright now
(The girl's a Super Geek)
The kind of girl you read about
(In Omni Magazine)
The girl is pretty brainy
(The girl's a Super Geek)
I'd really like to test her
(Every time we meet)
She's alright, she's alright, she's alright with me, yeah
She's a Super Geek, Super Geek, she's super-geeky

She's a very special girl
From her glasses to her Oxfords
And she will help me study AP math and physics
And AP bio, too

"Live long and prosper"'s what she says
"Back in the chem lab I'll be waiting"
When I get there, she's got Number Two pencils
It's such a geeky scene

The girl is pretty bright now
(The girl's a Super Geek)
The kind of girl you read about
(In Omni Magazine)
The girl is pretty brainy
(The girl's a Super Geek)
I'd really like to test her
(Every time we meet)
She's alright, she's alright, she's alright with me, yeah
She's a Super Geek, Super Geek, she's super-geeky

P.S. For those of you who don't know, the pic is of Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I tried to find a picture of her looking really nerdy, but most of the pics I found in the Internet were of the later, more stylish Willow. This was the nerdiest one I could find.

It's the Helsinki Complaints Choir. And it's exactly what that sounds like. (BTW, the video isn't really eight and a half minutes long -- it's more like six and a half, for some reason there's two minutes of blank space at the end.)

Apparently this complaints choir thing is a growing and worldwide artistic movement. If you go to YouTube and do a search on "complaints choir" (or just go to the complaints choir website -- damn, i love this century!), you'll find a bunch. But the Finnish one is by far the best. I think my favorite complaint in the whole song (probably because I was just talking about it) is "Old forests are cut down and turned into toilet paper/And still all the toilets are always out of paper." It sounds so lyrical and haunting in Finnish!

Thanks to Pharyngula for the tip... and for the hilarious conversation afterward. We really need to get the Atheist Complaints Choir going!

If you're not a fan of both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and They Might Be Giants, this will probably make absolutely no sense to you at all. But if you are, you're going to love it. A friend sent it to me: it's called "21 Vidlets About Buffy the Vampire Slayer," and it... well, just enjoy.

Is this the Yuletide?
It's such a mystery
Will I be denied
Or will there be gifts for me?

Come down the stairs
Look under the tree and see...

This is the best Christmas song ever. It's Pledge Drive's Christmas-themed parody of "Bohemian Rhapsody," written by my friend Tim Walters and his friend Steve Rosenthal. And it's absolutely dead-on -- the lyrics, the performance, the production, everything. You will never be able to listen to "Bohemian Rhapsody" again without thinking of it... and without falling into fits of the giggles when you do. You can listen to an MP3 here:

There's this Loud Family song that's been stuck in my head off and on for weeks now. It’s called "Not Expecting Both Contempo and Classique," and it starts thus:

Admiring paper on my wall
How many really take the time?
There may not seem that much creative latitude
But that's the challenge of design

The curves intuitively know
Which aspects of nouveau to save
Without succumbing to the full devouring will
Of Aubrey Beardsley in his grave

I'm not expecting that I'll end up with you just because I need to...

Now. Compare this to the song "Flowers On the Wall" by the Statler Brothers (which I assume the Loud Family song is referencing):

Counting flowers on the wall
That don't bother me at all...

You may notice the main difference between the two songs. The Statler Brothers dispatch with the "staring at the wall" experience in two lines -- while the Loud Family spends an entire two verses exploring it. It’s not 'til the chorus that they even touch on the lonely-sad-love-song stuff.

Why do I like this?

I like this for a couple of reasons. And it's not just the fact that they worked Aubrey Beardsley into a pop song. I like it because it actually conveys the experience it's referring to, instead of just referring to it. I mean, whenever I'm staring at the wallpaper in a blue funk, I'm not just staring blankly -- I have long, elaborate thought processes about the wallpaper pattern. Mine tend not to be reflections on design and design history -- they tend instead to focus on the details of the geometric patterns, with obsessive-compulsive-ish ruminations about how well the panels of paper do or don't join up. But I do get completely lost in morbidly detailed thoughts about the actual wallpaper itself. And by spending two entire verses closely examining the experience of staring at wallpaper -- by "really taking the time" -- that's what these verses get across.

Perhaps more importantly, I like how non-generic it is. So many pop songs -- especially pop songs about love -- try to connect with the audience by making their lyrics as general and lowest-common-denominator as possible. "I'm in love and I'm happy," "He/she doesn't love me and I'm sad." Everyone knows how that feels, right?

But I don't think that works. One of the great paradoxes of art is that you often make a better connection with your audience by making your detail more specific rather than less. Detail is one of the best ways to make an experience seem more vivid, more real. Even if the audience can't identify with those specific details, the details make it easier to feel what the artist is feeling -- and to find the similar feeling in yourself. When lyrics are generic, of course you can identify with them -- but the connection is shallow, and you forget about it five minutes later. (Obviously you can go too far in the other direction with self-absorbed navel-gazing... but even that's usually more interesting than "My boyfriend left me and I'm sad.")

Also, the Loud Family just rocks. They're one of those rare pop bands that can walk the slender balance beam between smart art and fun accessibility: between music you can listen to closely with serious attention and deep satisfaction, and music you can happily bench-press to when it comes up on your shuffle at the gym. If you haven't already, check them out.